Friday, February 29, 2008

1822 - 1878.Scottish landscape painter, born in Carlisle, the son of a shoemaker. He worked as a theatre scenery painter but was encouraged by James Macnee to take up painting. He moved to Edinburgh and did many Scottish subjects in oils and watercolours.

[Cadzow Forest] 1852oil on canvasHe often worked with Alexander Fraser in Cadzow Forest.

1800 - 1870.A landscape painter and watercolourist. Born in Bristol where he worked, self-taught, until he was 35 but then moved to London and exhibited at the RA and other venues. At first he painted around Bristol but later travelled on the Continent. He admired Turner and it has clearly influenced him.

Reid was born in Aberdeen and studied there at Gray's School of Art before proceeding to the Royal Scottish Academy Schools in Edinburgh. He sent two pictures to the RSA in 1895, but by 1899 he had settled in London, where he exhibited twenty-four works at the Royal Academy (19(10-37) and a similar number at the Royal Society of British Artists (1905-15), of which he was a member. He also occasionally supported the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and the Liverpool and Manchester exhibitions.

A versatile talent, Reid painted historical subjects. landscapes and portraits. while around the turn of the century and in the 1900s he was quite a prolific illustrator of magazines and books. Most of the latter were historical and legendary works aimed at children; in 1910 he illustrated a version of the Siegfried legend that F.C. Pape was also treating at this period. Reid's paintings of historical subjects were strongly influenced by E.A. Abbey, as the present example shows. Dating from as late as 1936, it is an amazing example of Victorian survival and demonstrates vividly the resilience of the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. Such a major work was surely exhibited. but the Venue, if there was one, has not been identified.

Frampton was a keen sailor and often featured water in his paintings. He was a painter and sculptor, primarily of religious subjects and later in his life was responsible for the decoration of several churches.

1828 - 1893.Another Liverpool artist. The son of a book keeper he entered the Liverpool Academy Schools in 1851 but by the end of that year had moved to the Royal Academy Schools in London. He exhibited at the Liverpool Academy 1852 - 65, becoming an Associate in 1854 and a Member in 1856.

This famous picture is the left wing of a triptych, The Legend of Pandora. She is shown about to open the jar of tribulations. The centre panal showing the result also survives.

Ernest Norman (1857 - 1923) was born in London, educated in Germany but returned to England in 1876. Though he first worked in his Father's office, he attended evening classes in art at St. Martin's and spent his spare time drawing the antique in the British Museum. In 1880, at the age of 23, he decided to become an artist and entered the Royal Academy Schools for three years before going to Paris in the studios of Constant and Lefebvre. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881 where he continued to exhibit till 1904. In 1884 he married the painter Henrietta Rae.

Born in London, the son of a surgeon, Watson received his formal education at Merchant Taylors' School. He began his art training at the St John's Wood School, and in 1889 graduated to the Royal Academy Schools where he gained the silver medal for drawing and the Landseer Scholarship. Byam Shaw was a fellow student at both schools and remained a close friend. Watson exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1891, becoming an Associate in 1923 and an Academician nine years later. He also an active member of the Royal Society of British Artists, the Society of Portrait Painters and the Art Workers Guild.

Watson made his living from portraiture. specialising in society portraits and official likenesses. City livery companies were among his most regular patrons, and he himself was Master of the Saddlers' Company in 1921. But he also painted nudes landscapes and figure subjects, as well as occasionally trying his hand at sculpture. The society portraits and the nudes are in a suave academic style, but underneath this cool exterior more complex forces were evidently at work, and Watson's subject pictures can be bizarre. As his Times obituary put it, while his work in general shows 'reserve of feeling and purity of line', he could 'become rather reckless when he let himself go'. One of his more 'reckless' compositions, Prometheus consoled by the Spirits of the Earth, a work of 1900 echoing G.F. Watts in his most cosmic vein, appeared in these Rooms on 5 March 1933. lot 99. Another. The Story of the Creation (1921; Wolverhampton), was seen in the Last Romantics exhibition at the Barbican in 1989. The Blakean figures have an exotic setting which anticipates Brangwyn's British Empire murals, or, as a contemporary critic observed. would have made an ideal backdrop for the Russian Ballet.

In 1909 Watson married Hilda Gardiner, a remarkable woman who had trained as a violinist but became known as a dancer and mine-artist, developing 'an original form of dramatic entertainment, half-play. half-masque. The couple lived for many years in Kensington. After Watson's death in 1934 the Fine Art Society held a memorial exhibition of his work, and the following year his picture A Lady in Black was bought for the Chantrey Bequest. There are further examples of his work at Bournemouth, Liverpool, Plymouth and Preston, and in the National Gallery of Canada Ottawa.

This comparatively early picture was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1848, the year that saw the foundation of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with which Paton had much sympathy. It is also contemporary with his celebrated paintings of the quarrel and reconciliation of Oberon and Titania, now in the National Gallery of Scotland. The Reconciliation had been shown at the RSA in 1847, and the Quarrel was to appear there in 1850, being developed from the artist's RSA diploma work of 1846. The air-borne figure of Aegle might have strayed from one of these paintings, and exemplifies Paton's passion for fairy subjects at this date. Indeed so fond of them was he that in 1850 the photographer David Octavius Hill urged him to send 'historical and sacred subjects' to the RSA in order to confound the critics who accused him of being 'fain mad'. Needless to say, his 'madness' makes him a central figure in the development of the genre of fairy painting which enjoyed such a vogue during the Victonan period.

The subject is taken from the sixth of Virgil's Ecluges, or Bucolics, in which Silenus, the boon companion of Bacchus, noted for his love of wine and skill in music, sings about the origin and nature of the world according to the Epicurean philosophy. At the of the poem he is discovered drunk by two youthful swains, Chromis and Mnasylus. The garlands of flowers which he wore for his recent debauch have fallen off, and they bind him with them, determined that he shall give them the song he has so often promised. Aegle, the fairest of the Naiads, joins in the fun, staining his forehead with the juice of mulberries. Silenus laughs and begs to be released. 'It is enough,' he says, 'that you show that you are able to bind me'; and he launches into song.

The subject is taken from the tench tale of the tenth day of Boccaccio's Decameron, a story rendered into Latin by Petrarch and adapted by Chaucer for the 'Clerk's Tale' in the Canterbury Tales. The Marquis of Saluzzo is persuaded by his subjects to marry, and chooses as his wife a humble peasant girl, Griselda. He then proceeds to test her loyalty by subjecting her to a senes of cruel trials, all of which she suffers with exemplary fortitude. For the Middle Ages, Griselda was the type or embodiment of Patience.

Exhibited at the RWS in 1916 and reproduced in the Studio the following year, the picture is a charming example of Cowper's early style, characterised by the strong influence of Italian Renaissance painting and an emphasis on the decorative effect of rich fabrics. Other examples include Vanity (1907), his RA diploma work, which echoes Giulio Roman's portrait of Isabella d'Este at Hampton Court; Rapunzel (1908), in the De Morgan Foundation's collection at Old Battersea House; and Lucretia Borgia reigns in the Vatican (Tate Gallery), which was bought for the Chantrey Bequest in 1914 and seems to have been inspired by Pintoricchio's frescoes in the Piccolomini Library at Siena.

This picture, with its left-facing profile pose, was clearly conceived with Renaissance portraits in mind.

The story of Griselda appealed to several Victorian artists, notably C.W. Cope, who illustrated it in a mural in the House of Lords (1849) and a painting exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1852. However. Cowper's painting belongs to a later phase of interest in Italian literary sources. Its closest parallels are the illustrations to the Decameron by his contemporary Byam Shaw (1899); those to a comparable woup of tales, Le piacevole notte by Gianfrancesco Straparola (died c. 1557), by the somewhat older E.R. Hughes (1894): and two late painting, by J.W. Waterhouse. again inspired by Boccaccio (1916-17: both Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight).

A study for one of the two children in King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (Tate). Te model was Philip Comyns, the 7 year old son of Joseph Comyns Carr, one of the directors of the Grovesnor and a close friend of the artist.

fl. 18911853 - 1941Born in Whitwell, near Sheffield and studied at the Sheffield School of Art and later at Godalming in Surrey. His early works are landscapes produced in S. Yorkshire and the Derbyshire area. He was influenced by Carlton Alfred Smith. Wilson kept clothes for his models to wear and painted by stippling on the colour with very fine brushes. He did not become a full time artist until he was 40 and only married at the age of 72. Very collectable.

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A blog on my love of Victorian and Edwardian paintings. Please note over 70,000 painters of this period, many very obscure, have been identified and this blog concentrates on those that have come up for auction in the last ten years or so. It is mainly compiled using old auction catalogues with help from the many reference books I own.

It includes painters born in the late 19th century who have painted well into the 20th. I make no pretence that my reproductions are technically accurate but are intended to show the style of the artist.

I rarely know who these paintings were sold to or the price they fetched. I recommend Artnet.com (a subscription service) to those for whom this is important. I am not in the Art trade, just an interested amateur who loves the arts of this period.